Michel Thomas Method
Encyclopedia
The Michel Thomas Method is an original method developed by Michel Thomas
for teaching languages
. Thomas stated that his students would be conversationally proficient after a few days' study.
Thomas has been hired by notable people such as Raquel Welch
, Barbra Streisand
, Emma Thompson
and Woody Allen
. He was hired by Grace Kelly
following her engagement to Prince Rainier of Monaco to meet her need to learn French rapidly. The method first came to prominence in Britain, following a BBC television
science documentary The Language Master, in which he taught French to sixth form
students for five days at a further education college in London in 1997. As a result of the interest generated by this documentary, UK publisher Hodder and Stoughton
commissioned Thomas to produce commercial versions of his courses.
Interviewed for the documentary The Language Master, Margaret Thompson, the headmistress of the school in which the documentary was filmed, commented that in general teachers "try and ... capture their [the students'] interest by finding them interesting materials that are supposedly related to their interests" but that what Thomas had demonstrated to her was that "it's the learning process itself that motivates these kids", not the material used.
The teacher then introduces short words and phrases in the target language. The students are asked how they would say an English phrase to the target language, starting with simple sentences and gradually building up to more advanced constructions. The phrases are chosen as common building blocks of the language's structure. When a student gives a correct answer, the teacher repeats the whole sentence with correct pronunciation. When the student's answer is wrong, the teacher helps the student to understand their mistake and to correct it. The most important words and phrases are reviewed repeatedly during the course. The method does not insist on perfect pronunciation from the beginning, instead providing progressive feedback and continual improvement by the process of shaping student response over the course of these repetitions.
In the courses recorded by Thomas himself (Spanish
, French
, Italian
and German
), the teaching focuses on verb conjugations and modal verb
constructions such as "I want to go". The vocabulary used in the course is fairly small, focusing mainly on function word
s in preference to lexical words
. Grammar
rules are introduced gradually, and grammatical terminology is generally avoided. In this way, the course builds complexity quickly, focusing on the skills required to translate sentences like "I want to know why you don't have it for me now, because it is very important for me and I need it", while avoiding much of the vocabulary and fixed-phrases presented in most mainstream courses. For example, in his recorded courses Thomas does not teach counting, days of the week or months of the year.
Michel Thomas often links cognates in the target language with their equivalents in the student's home language, and in his courses in the Romance languages
, many of the Latinate borrowings in English are highlighted to allow the student to incorporate their existing vocabulary into the target language.
The commercial recordings are simply a recording of a live class with two students (one male and one female). The listener is required to pause the recording in order to respond to Thomas's prompt, then resume the recording to listen to the other students' responses, after which they will hear Thomas repeat the correct answer. Thomas urges the listener to take the time to think out how to say the phrase in the target language, rather than answering quickly. The recorded method became in 2003.
recordings. The first courses published (2007) were Russian by Natasha Bershadski, Arabic by Jane Wightwick and Mandarin Chinese by Harold David
Goodman. Goodman studied with Thomas for 10 years. These and subsequent courses in Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Polish and Greek are live recordings of the teaching sessions.
A series of vocabulary courses were also released for both the new languages and the original languages taught by Thomas. "Michel Thomas Method:
Spanish Vocabulary Course" was created by Rose Lee Haydon, who previously taught with Michel Thomas at his school in New York City.
Unlike the original Thomas by Michel himself, these were edited before release, removing a lot of correction of the students' errors.
Michel Thomas
Michel Thomas was a polyglot linguist, language teacher and decorated war veteran. He survived imprisonment in several different Nazi concentration camps after serving in the Maquis of the French Resistance and worked with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II...
for teaching languages
Language education
Language education is the teaching and learning of a foreign or second language. Language education is a branch of applied linguistics.- Need for language education :...
. Thomas stated that his students would be conversationally proficient after a few days' study.
Thomas has been hired by notable people such as Raquel Welch
Raquel Welch
Jo Raquel Tejada , better known as Raquel Welch, is an American actress, author and sex symbol. Welch came to attention as a "new-star" on the 20th Century-Fox lot in the mid-1960s. She posed iconically in a animal skin bikini for the British-release One Million Years B.C. , for which she may be...
, Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand
Barbra Joan Streisand is an American singer, actress, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, four Emmy Awards, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy,...
, Emma Thompson
Emma Thompson
Emma Thompson is a British actress, comedian and screenwriter. Her first major film role was in the 1989 romantic comedy The Tall Guy. In 1992, Thompson won multiple acting awards, including an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress, for her performance in the British drama Howards End...
and Woody Allen
Woody Allen
Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...
. He was hired by Grace Kelly
Grace Kelly
Grace Patricia Kelly was an American actress who, in April 1956, married Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, to become Princess consort of Monaco, styled as Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, and commonly referred to as Princess Grace.After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of...
following her engagement to Prince Rainier of Monaco to meet her need to learn French rapidly. The method first came to prominence in Britain, following a BBC television
BBC Television
BBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation, which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927, has produced television programmes from its own studios since 1932, although the start of its regular service of television...
science documentary The Language Master, in which he taught French to sixth form
Sixth form
In the education systems of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and of Commonwealth West Indian countries such as Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, Jamaica and Malta, the sixth form is the final two years of secondary education, where students, usually sixteen to eighteen years of age,...
students for five days at a further education college in London in 1997. As a result of the interest generated by this documentary, UK publisher Hodder and Stoughton
Hodder & Stoughton
Hodder & Stoughton is a British publishing house, now an imprint of Hachette.-History:The firm has its origins in the 1840s, with Matthew Hodder's employment, aged fourteen, with Messrs Jackson and Walford, the official publisher for the Congregational Union...
commissioned Thomas to produce commercial versions of his courses.
Method
With Thomas's method, the teacher cautions students to avoid making notes and to refrain from making conscious attempts to memorise, promising that the teacher will "be taking full responsibility" for their learning. Thomas stated that keeping the students relaxed, focused and stretched with a feeling of mounting successful achievement, is at the heart of the method. The removal of the stress and anxiety 'of being put on the spot' of conventional language learning, especially school language learning, is a key goal of the method.Interviewed for the documentary The Language Master, Margaret Thompson, the headmistress of the school in which the documentary was filmed, commented that in general teachers "try and ... capture their [the students'] interest by finding them interesting materials that are supposedly related to their interests" but that what Thomas had demonstrated to her was that "it's the learning process itself that motivates these kids", not the material used.
The teacher then introduces short words and phrases in the target language. The students are asked how they would say an English phrase to the target language, starting with simple sentences and gradually building up to more advanced constructions. The phrases are chosen as common building blocks of the language's structure. When a student gives a correct answer, the teacher repeats the whole sentence with correct pronunciation. When the student's answer is wrong, the teacher helps the student to understand their mistake and to correct it. The most important words and phrases are reviewed repeatedly during the course. The method does not insist on perfect pronunciation from the beginning, instead providing progressive feedback and continual improvement by the process of shaping student response over the course of these repetitions.
In the courses recorded by Thomas himself (Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
and German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
), the teaching focuses on verb conjugations and modal verb
Modal verb
A modal verb is a type of auxiliary verb that is used to indicate modality -- that is, likelihood, ability, permission, and obligation...
constructions such as "I want to go". The vocabulary used in the course is fairly small, focusing mainly on function word
Function word
Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker...
s in preference to lexical words
Lexical item
A Lexical item is a single word or chain of words that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon . Examples are "cat", "traffic light", "take care of", "by-the-way", and "it's raining cats and dogs"...
. Grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
rules are introduced gradually, and grammatical terminology is generally avoided. In this way, the course builds complexity quickly, focusing on the skills required to translate sentences like "I want to know why you don't have it for me now, because it is very important for me and I need it", while avoiding much of the vocabulary and fixed-phrases presented in most mainstream courses. For example, in his recorded courses Thomas does not teach counting, days of the week or months of the year.
Michel Thomas often links cognates in the target language with their equivalents in the student's home language, and in his courses in the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, many of the Latinate borrowings in English are highlighted to allow the student to incorporate their existing vocabulary into the target language.
Prerecorded courses
In Thomas's schools, students would start their study listening to programmed courses recorded on tape by Thomas himself. The exact content of these courses is not currently public knowledge, but this approach formed the basis of the commercial audio courses.The commercial recordings are simply a recording of a live class with two students (one male and one female). The listener is required to pause the recording in order to respond to Thomas's prompt, then resume the recording to listen to the other students' responses, after which they will hear Thomas repeat the correct answer. Thomas urges the listener to take the time to think out how to say the phrase in the target language, rather than answering quickly. The recorded method became in 2003.
Posthumous publications
After the death of Michel Thomas, Hodder and Stoughton used the method to create courses in languages other than those for which Thomas leftrecordings. The first courses published (2007) were Russian by Natasha Bershadski, Arabic by Jane Wightwick and Mandarin Chinese by Harold David
Goodman. Goodman studied with Thomas for 10 years. These and subsequent courses in Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Polish and Greek are live recordings of the teaching sessions.
A series of vocabulary courses were also released for both the new languages and the original languages taught by Thomas. "Michel Thomas Method:
Spanish Vocabulary Course" was created by Rose Lee Haydon, who previously taught with Michel Thomas at his school in New York City.
Unlike the original Thomas by Michel himself, these were edited before release, removing a lot of correction of the students' errors.